Stress is inevitable in today’s environment Stress is inevitable in today’s environment. The following pages contain verbiage, tips, a printable poster and other articles and resources about how we can try to manage stress and mitigate the impact stress has on us.

What and Why In today’s fast-paced world, stress is unavoidable. Demand of work and home have us pulled in many directions. A little stress can be good, as it can make us rise to the occasion. Long-term stress, however, is detrimental to our health. It can affect your body, your thoughts and feelings, and your behavior. Chronic stress can trigger long-term changes in brain structure and function. Being able to recognize common stress symptoms can give you a jump on managing them. This month, let’s take a moment to find ways to mitigate the chaos in our lives and try to diminish some of our stress.

Ideas for activities Try different approaches to your “to-do” list this month to find a method that enhances your productivity and reduces stress. Perhaps you keep a short list of high priority items that must be achieved that day or use the Eishenhower matrix, for example. Have the team share their strategies. At a team lunch and learn, have everyone share something one thing they are going to stop doing or start doing in order to reduce stress. Saying it out loud makes us accountable for truly implementing the change.

Resources Articles Videos 20 Ways to Eliminate Stress From Your Life Stress: Manage it? Or Avoid It? Help Your Team Manage Stress, Anxiety, and Burnout Videos How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll Be Stressed The Art of Stillness

25 Tips Examine your schedule and make sure each activity is buffered by several minutes before and after so you can spend that time traveling, resting, eating and doing other things you need to do between appointments. Spend time with positive people who enhance your life. A strong support system will buffer you from the negative effects of stress. Being sedentary is hard on our bodies and minds. Take a walk around the block, enough to get your blood pumping and get more oxygen to your brain. “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” — Dwight Eisenhower. Learn and practice relaxation techniques. Try breathing exercises, meditation, prayer, yoga or tai chi. Commit yourself to being 15 minutes early to everything.

MORE Tips Analyze your schedule, responsibilities, and daily tasks. If you’ve got too much on your plate, distinguish between the “shoulds” and the “musts.” Drop tasks that aren’t truly necessary to the bottom of the list or eliminate them entirely. Being over-committed causes stress. Find kind ways to politely turn down that next invitation to serve on a committee or help with a project. Besides, it can open up an opportunity for Pets are a great stress reducer and can help control their owners’ overall stress level. Disorganization can stress us out. Take time to get things in your life organized, starting with your desk and the papers in your home, and moving on to other areas. Staring at a computer screen for more than 20 minutes is hard on our eyes and mentally taxing. Use the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, take a break for at least 20 seconds and look at objects that are 20 feet away from you. You don’t have to do everything yourself. If possible delegate and let someone else get that task or project done.

More tips Establish some work-life boundaries for yourself. That might mean making a rule not to check email from home in the evening, or not answering the phone during dinner. Creating some clear boundaries between these realms can reduce the potential for work-life conflict and the stress that goes with it. It's critical that you disconnect from time to time, in a way that fits your needs and preferences. Don't let your vacation days go to waste. When possible, take time off to relax and unwind, so you come back to work feeling reinvigorated and ready to perform at your best. Manage your time by prioritizing what is important and/or necessary to you. Good time management can make your life easier and less stressful. The process of making and drinking a cup of tea can give you a much-needed pause. Find a quiet space, close your eyes, focus your breathing and transport yourself to your happy place for a few minutes each day.

More tips Call a friend, send an email. When you share your concerns or feelings with another person, it does help relieve stress. It’s important that the person whom you talk to is someone whom you trust and whom you feel can understand and validate you. Say no, where you can, to things that would add more stress to your life. Take a moment to refuel with a handful of nuts or seeds, a piece of fruit or dark chocolate. If you’re working on a mentally taxing project, try timed working methods. Set a times for 25 minutes, and when it goes off, take a short 5-minute break. Add “mini-breaks” to your at-home to do list. Simply taking a bath, going for a run or brisk walk, reading a book or listening to music are all great ways to quiet the mind and de-stress. Make time for hobbies and interests.

More tips Create more open periods of time in your life. It’s not necessary to schedule every minute of our lives. Learn to avoid meetings and keep wide open blocks of time where we either work on our important tasks or batch process the smaller ones. Caffeine might help you study in the short term, but it interrupts sleep and makes you more anxious, tense and jittery. This obviously ups your stress level. Try and drink no more than one caffeinated beverage a day. While it’s impossible to eliminate all negative stress from your life, you can control the way you react to stress. Your body’s natural fight-or-flight response can take its toll. When you’re faced with a stressful situation that your mind perceives as a threat, it sends various chemicals, like adrenaline and cortisol, throughout your body. As a result, heart rate and breathing speeds up and your digestion slows down. This tires out the body.

Appendix We can’t take all of the credit. In compiling this information, we referenced the following organizations, publications and websites: Psychologytoday.com APA.org WebMD.com RD.com PositivityBlog.com WikiHow.com HelpGuide.org Blue Magazine – Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield Costco Connection Magazine ZenHabits.net Ulifeline.net